


There's a certain sadness at the end of this road

by Royalrastafariannaynays



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Character Death, Gen, M/M, Morbid, References to Depression, Terminal Illnesses, Zombiestuck, hahaha, let me know if i didn't tag anything, that last one was funny, the graphic depictions of violence is mostly gross stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16215719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Royalrastafariannaynays/pseuds/Royalrastafariannaynays
Summary: John Egbert's friends all get Infected, and all he wants to do is make them better. But there are some things even a wonder-kid can't do.





	There's a certain sadness at the end of this road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silvervictory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvervictory/gifts).



[[DAY 1]]

The news reports say it began with a fungus. 

A tiny, but invasive fungus. 

There were articles and listicles and memes and all that useless garbage that said _so much_ about that fungus not even theoretically working on humans. The one that takes over ant bodies, and controls them in shallow and un-useful ways? That one. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you don’t remember as much about it as you’d like to think. 

The day before all Hell broke loose in your world, it was your birthday. All three of your best friends were in town for it, and instead of baking a cake for your birthday, your father just paid for the four of you to rent a lake house for a week, and that day, you were all out by the water. It was one of the best days of your life. 

Dave, who’d gone off to college in The Big Apple, was overjoyed. Long distance relationships totally blew, just as much as everyone says. But worse. You and he were able to be around each other for that whole seven days, relaxing and happy and oh man, how you missed him.

Rose, who was working on her second best-seller after her mother bribed a publishing company to seriously consider her first, was content for the first time in forever. Therapy helped her relationship with her mother a lot. Jade brought her dog, an Abyssinian named Becquerel, from her posting as a medic in a remote village in Alaska, and relished the seventy degree weather like it was a humid Jamaican beach. The dog was not, so much.

Then you got the call. 

Your jeep was full of gas, thankfully. But your father was telling you not to come home. He sounded urgent, devastated and panicked over the tinny line, and you remember being so confused. What was wrong? 

There was static, and deep booming resonation. Tone got more urgent, and you could hear tears in his voice. Something about patient zero in a lab there, in Seattle. It got out. It got out, and it could have infected so many others already. The toxin was in the air here, he said. The toxin was in the air, and you needed to stay safe. You couldn’t come home. You could never come home. 

He told you he loved you, and then there was so much noise. Feedback from the phone, crashing and falling and your father screaming, and then nothing. The line cut off. 

Dave walked in, smiling, reaching for your waist. 

He saw your face, and tried asking what was wrong.

A presidential alert came to both of your phones, at once. 

_“Seattle, Washington, has been purged with nuclear weaponry. The air is clear. Please go home and await further instruction.”_

\----------

[[DAY 12]]

It wasn’t in the air. 

No further instruction comes.

Before anything else can be done, there are only a few places in the entire continental United States that are safe. Blood testing and masks are required before entry. Hospitals are raided, entire downs eradicated with fire and bombs and the Infected. The Infected somehow had gotten on places before they knew what was wrong. Air traffic is halted, but they have to land somewhere. 

The fungus is spread like the common cold, sort of. Through coughing, through saliva and sneezes and bites and blood. The Infected go after the clean, rending their limbs of flesh and their bodies of life. Graphic descriptions of terror and blood and people being consumed by hordes of Infected sweep the radios and internet, until those, too, go away. 

No one is truly safe. 

\----------

[[DAY 83]]

In the beginning, the four of you build traps and lines of cans that will alert you when something comes too close. Bec stands watch at night with one of the four of you, and none of the Infected come your way. The fish in the lake are fine to eat, and Jade finds some seeds to plant a small garden with Lettuce and so on, but until that’s managed, there are plenty of canned goods. 

Eventually you have to leave the lake house. It’s too risky to stay. The lake house is isolated, and your friends feel safer there, but you’re running out of food, the garden somehow all died overnight, and animals have stopped showing up.

The foggy voices on the only radio station left in existence say there’s a huge wave of Infected heading in your direction. Somehow. So you have to get out. 

Everyone gets their shit together, Dave’s eyes closed off to the world, and Rose going over the millions of plans and paths of action. She imagines D.C. will have a safe place, since the President has not yet been pronounced dead. 

The crickets aren’t even making noise when you drive away from the house. And with no maps, it’s going to take a long time to drive the back roads to the East Coast. 

\----------

[[DAY 91]]

Gas stations are abandoned, piles of corpses sitting on the sides of the roads, and thankfully Dave knows how to operate one of their registers to make fuel pump out. The stink of bodies is everywhere by the time you reach Idaho. It pervades the air the closer you get to towns and cities. Occasionally one of you will see a deer or small animal. But no other people. 

In Wisconsin, you have to go into a town. You park in the back of a Safeway, intending to only go in for necessities: canned goods, non-perishables, medicine and bandages, and some water filters.

There are Infected in the store, and not even Bec notices. You barely make it out with your lives. Dave shoves you out of a door while Jade blows the head off every Infected she can with her shotgun. Her dog doesn’t make it. 

Rose gets blood in her mouth. Dave gets five gashes across his chest. Jade is bitten. 

As you’re speeding away from the store, you know.

You’re the only one who’s still going to be human. 

\----------

[[DAY 92]]

“I’m going to go and get more wood,” you say, once you and Rose have set up the campfire. Dave and Jade are changing the bandages on their respective wounds, and Jade hasn’t said a thing since the Safeway. When you return, keeping a close eye on the surroundings and listening intently for anything out of the ordinary, they’re huddled together. 

Jade looks up at you first, rubbing one of her eyes with the heel of her hand. She still isn’t speaking, but when she sees your face a sob spills out of her mouth, and she looks almost immediately back down. 

“What’s wrong?” you ask, a creeping feeling in the pit of your stomach. 

At the same time, Jade unveils the bandages around her foot, Dave yanks down the collar of his shirt, and Rose opens her mouth. In each place, there are patches of sickly light green, and indigo lines traveling on their veins. 

They all know, and you know.

“No,” you blurt, immediately seeing the options they’re going to give you. All of them end with them no longer being around. “No, no no no.” 

“We’re going to protect you, now, John. To get you safe,” Dave says, and his voice is shaking. He’s only twenty-five. You’re all only twenty-five. But your friends are just going to—

“Are you just giving up?!” you ask them, enraged. You throw the kindling down at your feet, and choke on ashes that fly into your throat. 

“We know we’re going to die, John,” Rose says, then. Dave is silent, eyes tired and pleading.

“We’re disposable now,” Dave adds. 

“I can’t! I can’t just let you guys do _nothing_ about your condition, I can’t! There’s a cure they’re working on out east, and –“

“John,” Dave says, firmly. You stand there, panting, as your boyfriend, your _best_ friend, stands up and places his fingers on your cheek. Rose looks away as you meet his eyes, and lean your face into the touch. He doesn’t kiss you. He can’t, now. Not without killing you, too.

“There’s no cure,” he whispers, like he’s trying very hard not to lose it in front of you. “Not in time.”

All you can do is roil in grief and terror. You’ll be alone. They’ll protect you and keep you company as long as they can, and then you’ll be alone. 

\----------

[[DAY 95]]

Abandoning your jeep and carrying all of your necessary supplies on your backs is difficult. The air inside a closed vehicle is too dangerous, though. They could infect you, too. Jade hands you her gun with trembling fingers, digging her heels in when you try to not accept it. Dave pulls it from her fingers, and slings it across your back. 

\---------

[[DAY 101]]

Rose, of all people, begins to turn first. 

It’s four days, and then yellow starts to creep into her eyes and skin as her liver shuts down. Without asking, you can tell that she’s lost depth perception from her eyes. Unsurprisingly, she panics. Rose, upon waking slowly on the morning of the sixth day, won’t get out of bed. She curls in on herself and hyperventilates. She can’t remember the name of her high school.

After a few days, she loses her ability to discern complex subjects. That’s the point at which she commands that you all lock her up every night before you go to sleep. 

Every pickup truck you pass, you check to see if it has gas. If anything, they could ride in the back, and it would be a quicker trip to Washington. 

No such luck.

\----------

[[DAY 117]]

Then it’s Jade who shows visible signs. Her transformation seems accelerated, almost. She’s entirely lost within five days of walking travel after Rose, and you have to have Dave hold her down while you strap a closed muzzle across her mouth to keep her from biting or spitting. It’s obvious that you have to chain her up, as well. 

On that night, Rose still sits at the campfire, huddled in her last vestiges of humanity. 

When two teeth fall from her mouth, instead of crying this time, she just walks over to the tree. Jade doesn’t respond to her like she does to you. Jade only seems to want to go after you, for whatever reason. And she tries, struggling against the bonds with hisses and growls and non-verbal struggle, as you clip the handcuffs around Rose’s wrists. 

The three of you left are well aware that the bonds are staying there permanently.

\----------

[[DAY 120]]

Rose’s eyes start to deteriorate. 

Dave wraps cloth around her head to keep the pus and flesh from falling out.

You feel guilty that you can’t stand to look at her anymore.

\----------

[[DAY 121]]

It hasn’t even been half a year since the Day, but it feels like a lifetime. 

“Ah, step off, I’m just tired,” Dave says, waving a hand at you. His eyes are bloodshot, and his nails have begun to club. He’s lasted the longest out of all of them. “Can’t expect a guy to always be on his game.” 

Dave laughs, a wry chuckle, and tugs on the rope that he’s using to string along the girls. They walk mostly mutely, now, with Dave between you and them. Occasionally you’ll hear some gurgling, or a moan, but mostly you just try to ignore it. You do your best to ignore the skin that’s peeling off around their mouths and wrists where the cuffs and bonds have them. 

Dave doesn’t look at them at all, except when he’s helping you clean them up as best you can. 

“No you’re not,” you say, and Dave waves at you again. His teeth look awful, and his breath has started to take on an unmaskable stench, like death. 

“I’m fine as a fuckin flower,” Dave says. “I’m not dead yet.”

“Was that a fucking Monty Python joke?” you ask him, incredulous. He grins at you when to turn to look at him. 

“Yeah,” he says, smiling. One of his eyes is turning a bit white. You look away again, and climb over a tree that’s fallen on the two-lane road you’re trailing across the sides of some steep hills. 

“You can’t just make jokes all the time to cover it up,” you say. Both of you know you’re not talking about his terrible sense of humor.

Dave is quiet for a few minutes as he leads the girls around the tree. Rose has leaves in her hair when she comes out. There’s an impulse to take a picture to show her, and embarrass her. She’d laugh about it, and then punish you in her weird psych way until you deleted not just the pic, but your whole phone. 

You regret the thought as soon as you have it.

Rose is long gone. 

“Don’t be such a _stiff_ ,” Dave says, and you turn around just to punch him in the shoulder. He laughs, and fuck, his breath smells. 

“You smell terrible. Sure you’re not a gross corpse?” you ask, ribbing him. 

Dave legitimately smiles at you joking back with him, and god, you cherish it so much. 

Anything to make him happy, now.

“Perhaps, but not quite as rotten as your sense of humor,” he fires back, and makes finger guns. 

\----------

[[DAY 129]]

This is the day that Dave finally loses the ability to make coherent sentences. 

He’s limping, and the blackened lines are spreading all the way down to his wrists, and you know somehow that it won’t be long. When you sprint in and out of a hardware store for a heat-containing sleeping bag, he holds the girls. When you get back out, he’s laying on the ground. 

You choke back on tears for a second before he sits straight up, and makes a ‘gotcha’ face.

If you weren’t afraid of doing it literally, you’d feel about ready to punch his teeth out. 

Dave laughs for hours about that. 

The next day, you have to wake him up. 

He’s not going to be laughing anymore, you can tell. 

 

\----------

[[DAY 131]]

Desperate for a good night’s sleep, you’ve found an empty house with a bed. Despite the occasional glimmers of humanity left in Dave’s eyes, you tie him to the porch with the others. They’ll cover up your smell to any surrounding Infected, and you might be able to ignore Jade’s constant groaning long enough to get some good shuteye. 

It’s getting colder and colder outside. You don’t know what state you’re in, anymore. Somewhere close to the border of Maryland, you think. Maybe. It’s taken longer than it should have to get here, but you’ve had to stop to eat, to sleep, to check on wounds and look around corners and avoid groups of Infected. 

You’ve started carrying a machete around, and you have your three friends attached to a rope with a stick that keeps them a safe distance away from you. It hurts.

There’s no one to talk to, anymore. And their eyes are generally blank. Sometimes you’ll hear a bird song, and that’s the only noise besides their gut rumbling and skidding, dragging footsteps. 

The bed is softer than you could have ever thought. It’s dusty, but you don’t care. It’s a bed. Machete resting on the bedside table, and a handful of jerky in your belly, you almost instantly fall asleep when you close your eyes. 

It must have only been five hours later when a boom wakes you up. At first, you lay perfectly still. Perfect way to get pushed out of a tree is moving too fast, and you’ve slept in a lot of trees to hide at night since there’s no one to keep watch. More than one occasion having to cling to your branch like a sloth is enough to teach that lesson.

Another boom, and you’re sitting up, jumping out of bed. That one sounded closer. 

But it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from inside. 

You’re alert faster than you thought possible, grabbing your stuff and running out to the porch. It’s late evening now, and despite the lowered visibility, what you see is nearly unbelievable. There’s a huge crater a bit away, bisecting the road to the house. 

Dave is making somewhat urgent noises when you get to him, and he’s tugging at his bonds. Rose seems almost scared, the first emotion from her in what feels like forever. 

Jade is sitting on a step and staring at the dust that has yet to clear. Unlike usual, she’s not even paying attention to you. She cocks her head, as if listening, and that’s when you hear it. 

A high whining noise. It gets louder, louder, and worse as the seconds take eternities to pass. 

You’re blown forward as the bomb hits the back half of the building. 

It blasts out the windows, throws your friends’ bodies into the trees, and seems to shake the world. There’s no sound as the earth seems to turn at an uneven rhythm, and the trees catch fire around you. Your heart beats louder than anything else, and you stagger to your feet, struggling to take back the breath stolen from you by the bomb. 

“Dave! Dave!” you call. Or you think you do. The only thing you can hear is a ringing, a pitched whine again, as a bomb hits in the trees some quarter mile away. And the smoke, fuck, the smoke. It gets into your lungs, claws at your trachea. You cough and attempt to cover your mouth with your shirt. 

“Dave!” you call once you can sort of hear again, and you hear a deep growl behind you. 

It’s Jade, who hears the next whining sound and takes off. You panic and follow her, thinking that maybe she’ll lead you to the others. And if not, you can at least save one. She runs faster than you thought the Infected were capable of, one arm moving and the other swinging wildly by her side. Eventually there’s no more smoke.

A clearing you pass through contains Rose, and her head tips up at the sound of you. You can hear her running behind you, making horrible and feral noises with her mouth. She trips a few times, but gets right back up. 

Something rockets out of the woods and tackles Jade to the ground. The blur of white, red and gray sends her sliding a full ten feet on the underbrush until they hit a tree and she stops, snarling like a rabid dog. The muzzle is still in the way, but her eyes are just white, pupils long gone and stretching black veins reaching across the cornea. 

It’s Dave, and he’s just holding her down quietly. He does nothing else except hold her clumsily with his weight while she struggles to move, but he’s just heavy enough. 

You’re reaching down to grab their ropes when Rose slams into you from the back. 

All of her teeth are gone by now, and you have to hold your eyes closed as you fall to the ground so that none of her body fluids get into yours. Spit drips on your cheek, and you shove her off with your feet even as she’s trying to claw at your overshirt with her tied hands. She’s still wearing her pack, so she’s heavy, but her body is easily thrown off. 

As soon as you have her pinned down, you tie her rope around the nearest root. 

More missiles shake the earth, but farther and farther away. 

What the Hell? 

Once Rose is secured, still drooling blood and snarling, but with increasingly calming severity, you turn to Dave and Jade. Jade is making the most awful noises, and you can see blood dripping through the holes of her muzzle. Dave is just lying there, though, and she’s not attacking him. Her bun is stuck through with dirt and dead leaves and ash.

It begins to rain. 

You tie Jade’s rope to the tree she’s up against, thankful that you have enough extra length to keep her there. 

Thunder and lightning strike, lighting the night sky with brilliance, and Christ, it’s cooler than you remember it being earlier. 

The booms stop entirely at that point, and you pull Dave off of Jade by the armpits, careful to watch his teeth. He’s not a biter; not that you’re aware, anyway. He’s just docile, somehow. The fire in the distance stops encroaching, or so it appears through the trees, and you remember a thing or two about carpet bombing to eliminate large crowds of the Infected. 

Was there a wave coming nearby? Or was that just routine and cursory? 

Regardless, maybe that means you’re close to a settlement.

Dave’s hair drips, and Rose sits, calmed by the wetness of the rain hitting her skin. Whatever that’s about. Jade is still heaving, snarling, constantly moaning like a bad incarnation of the Night of the Living Dead. 

Guess this is where you’re going to be until sun-up.

It takes you the rest of the night to set up your tarp and patch your injuries together. Your wrist feels broken. It’s not safe to sleep in a tree for awhile, you wager. Not with the injuries. Of all things, though, your glasses aren’t broken. 

\----------

You must pass out, because the next thing you know, there’s light peering through the branches at you. It must have stopped raining a little while ago, since the ground isn’t wet, but still muddy. 

When you look around, folding up the tarp and slinging your pack onto your back, you feel like something’s off. Rose and Jade’s leads are in your hands, and you very much do not look at where their nails are growing longer with time, cracking and falling off in places. 

“Wait,” you say. 

Dave’s gone. 

“Dave??” you call, looking around. He’s not nearby. 

Your heart stops beating for a second when you realize you hadn’t bound him last night. 

Jade and Rose manage to keep up as you race back in the direction you came. The only direction that makes any sense to you. 

When you come up on the rubble of the house, blown to pieces with stretches of wood and rick just lying around, you hitch Rose and Jade to a railing near the outskirts of the damage. 

“Dave!!” you call. He’s… they’re the only thing you have left, and maybe you can save them, and you can’t give up on them yet because there could still be a _cure_ , and—

Oh, there he is. 

He’s hunched over in the middle of the wreckage, digging in the dirt. 

Oh thank fuck. 

“Hey?” you ask him, even though you know he won’t answer you. He keeps digging mechanically, fingers coated in dirt and knees stained with mud. 

“What’s wrong?” you ask, then, and he still doesn’t answer. 

But you see something glimmer in the hole he’s digging, and your eyes widen. 

“Drop something?” you ask, and touch his shoulder, pushing him a little out of the way. “Lemme just…”

You reach into the hole, and he keeps reaching, digging in the air like a puppy trying to swim, and your fingers latch onto something hard and metallic. 

It’s. 

Oh. 

He lost them? How? You didn’t even know he still had them on him, this whole time. They’d disappeared at some point, since the direction he was going didn’t require shades.

The first present you ever gave him. 

Your heart wants to explode, and you feel your eyes get hot and your nose prickle, and it’s so devastatingly tragic that you just wish for the first time that you’d never even been born into this fate. 

Holding up the shades in both hands, you look up into his blank eyes. Now that the object’s been recovered, Dave just stands there, pale as death, empty expression and seemingly unaware that you’re even in front of him. 

“You came back for them,” you say. 

He doesn’t respond. 

“You came… back.” 

Dave stays where he is, no indication of understanding, or feeling, comprehension, consciousness, nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

So you slip the shades into the front of his shirt. You touch the bandages at his neck. And you pull him into your arms. 

You don’t let go for a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> hey, sorry for the sads T_T it was cathartic to write tho!!! and it was fun to write, like really fun. feel free to let me know if i should tag anything else, or if you see any glaring typos! i love u all and hope you're having a beautiful weekend. <3
> 
> This fic is partially based off of headcanon but the prompt was inspired by dzueni's zombiestuck comic, [http://dzueni.tumblr.com/post/146991898112/johndave-week-day-2-your-au-or-favorite](here)!


End file.
